“It might not be anything serious, right? It might be something else.”
I say yes, the doctors don’t know yet.
“I hope you’re not lying to me.”
“I explained everything in the letter, Viviane,” I say, letting my head drop. “Can we not overdramatize this, please?”
“Don’t be like that. Look at me.”
I obey.
“That’s better,” says Viviane. “You’re ill, I have a right to worry.”
This encounter must be much more difficult for her than it is for me. She has no hidden motives; I, however, am thinking all the time about this visit I’ve decided to pay, and for which Viviane is instrumental. Perhaps she’s now grown used to my absence, after who knows what efforts, and then I show up and write to her asking that we see each other again. I want to question her: Have you gotten used to it? Viviane, have you stopped loving me? I don’t, perhaps because it would be an awful way of playing dirty. I want to play fair with Viviane. I owe her a lot, and I know it. I thank her for coming, for putting up with this. But at the very moment I speak, the car fills with noise, because the train has gone into a tunnel.
“What did you say?” she asks me.
“Nothing, nothing,” I say. “I like it better when the train is aboveground.”
Viviane doesn’t reply.
“Here we are.” I nudge her gently with my fingertips. “We have to get off here.”
Of course I am ashamed of my cowardice; I don’t know if the harm I’m doing to Viviane is justified. But seeing my father is, today at least, a necessity. When we come up outside, my shoes are heavy as if I were walking on sand.
—
FIVE WEEKS after leaving Viviane, while reading an uninteresting essay by Georges Perec one night, I felt a hardness under my jaw. Bending my chin down, as one often does when reading in bed, I felt like I had a glass marble stuck to my skin. I spent the whole night bending my neck, lowering my chin, moving my head; discovering all the positions in which the marble made its presence known. Up till then I had never been ill: illnesses were things that happened to other people, someone else’s anecdotes or passing difficulties. A week later, after blood tests had been done, when each doctor whom another doctor referred me to evaluated the same symptoms and asked the same questions about pain, about my family medical history and possible fatigue, I began to experience a new sensation. As I crossed Paris by metro for another appointment or to pick up the results of the latest test, I was afraid, because each time a doctor touched my throat, I felt certain—it was an exaggerated but not entirely false certainty—that the marble had doubled in size. I was afraid because all the doctors asked me to undress, although for me it was a simple inflammation in a place that had nothing to do with my armpits, my elbows, the backs of my knees, or the flesh of my abdomen, and, nevertheless, the doctors pressed all over, with their fingers of greenish latex, looking for other inflammations. The first time this happened, a young doctor on Avenue de la Motte-Picquet told the woman who had recommended him to me what she then told me over the phone later that day. I don’t know if he confided in her with the express intention that she would repeat it to me, almost word for word, as she in fact did. “Xavier says that you shouldn’t worry too much. If it really is cancer, we’re going to find out relatively quickly.”
That was not the case: we did not know relatively quickly. The diagnoses continued to be imprecise, and I continued to walk around Paris—now almost all the doctors I saw were in the 15th arrondissement, which, at least, meant I didn’t have to spend the whole day underground in the metro—with the feeling that something was getting away from me: time, the city I was beginning to hate, the simple truth, daily calm. Unidentifiable lytic detritus, the detection of macrophages, all this was like a keyhole, barely suggesting the illness with a hermeticism resembling poetry. People’s curious glances soon began to try my patience. But then I’d get home, look in the mirror, and forgive them, for it was impossible to pretend that the deformity on my face might not attract attention. It had transformed into half a sphere, as prominent as if someone had sewn a pocket onto my left jawbone, and it was tender and the skin covering it was a lighter color, milky like the water in a puddle. I was tormented by the lack of symmetry, the bulge I’d occasionally catch sight of on my shadow, the hindrance if I looked back over my left shoulder; but more than anything else, my lost invisibility, the notoriety my face acquired in any public place. I was no longer nobody, now I was a person among the abstract assembly of people in the metro. I didn’t know, until that moment, the importance I gave to the possibility of being incognito, and now, suddenly, everybody I crossed paths with on the street was like a relative who looked at me from afar until realizing, by the time they were at my side, that no, we’d never seen each other before. I learned to hate. At a pedestrian crossing at the Jardin du Luxembourg, a woman waiting beside me to cross Rue de Vaugirard approached me to ask, point-blank, what that was I had on my face; the youngest daughter of Madame Schumer, my landlady, refused to greet me with a kiss, and her expression revealed disgust and fear at the same time. She was an eight-year-old girl, but I felt contempt for her (and for all the rest of the children I saw outside, clean and healthy, unaware of their bodies) and avoided her from then on.
The same day I had a chest X-ray and an MRI, I received a call I didn’t get to in time because I was in the shower trying to wash the blue gel the doctor had smeared on the scanner wand off my neck and chest: a cold lubricant that left me feeling, on the way home, that my cotton clothes were constantly sticking to my skin, not like sweat, but like dry nectar. The absurd possibility that it had been my father calling lodged in my head. It was absurd, because he didn’t know I was no longer married, didn’t have my new phone number, and knew nothing of my indecipherable illness; it was absurd, above all, because my father never had any reason to want to talk to me. Now, imagining it had been him who called seemed unusual for me, almost fantastical, except for the fact of probable death. In the cinema, walking along the Canal Saint-Martin, over breakfast, the probability I was dying of lymphatic cancer had begun to dog me. Maybe I still had a few doctors to consult; I still hadn’t received test results proving it irrefutably, but I had already stopped feeling I had more than enough time.
A couple of days earlier, then, I made up my mind. I’d just undergone the last tests: several punctures that extracted a sepia-colored liquid from the swollen lymph node, a liquid that would be left to ferment for three days on a saucer like the ones we used in school to separate salt from water, and which would, according to Dr. Fauchey, give us fundamental information about the nature of my illness. I didn’t actually see the instrument used: I felt a sharp itch but no real pain, because the skin covering the node lost sensitivity and became almost dead tissue. While I was waiting for the results, I went out for a walk through Montparnasse, perhaps trying to catch a little of Parisians’ feigned frenzy, but my impatience obliged me to look for a pay phone and call the doctor. His secretary answered; she said that Fauchey was out of town until the weekend. “Call him on Monday,” the woman had said, and I felt something like hatred toward her. “Does the doctor have a mobile?” I asked, and heard a no, first of all, and then a long silence on the other end of the line. “Give me that number,” I said. “I might have . . . I might be very ill and not know it. It’ll be your responsibility, mademoiselle.” The threat was infantile, but effective. The strange thing was my difficulty in pronouncing the name of my possible illness. For some time now the word itself, seen by chance in the display window of the Odéon medical bookshop or even in a magazine horoscope, would provoke slight dizziness and an empty feeling in my stomach.
I dialed Fauchey’s number three times. A recording kept saying the telephone was switched off or out of range.
Then I phoned my father. I put up with his preliminary sarcasm, the indirect complaints about my absence—he asked if I was coming to
take revenge after my banishment to the Isle of Ur—and I put up with the terrible excuses he offered for not seeing me: activities he gave up after my mother left, seeing friends who’d gradually left him alone since he started drinking. I didn’t hang up, despite his comments, and maybe that’s why my proposal had an air of a considered resolution, not of affection or nostalgia, impressions that would have provoked his flight.
“I was planning to stay home this weekend anyway,” he’d told me. “Come on over, bring your wife and a bottle of whiskey.”
—
MY FATHER’S BUILDING is in a neighborhood of cobbled streets, which is nonetheless hostile and dark. There’s lots of graffiti, but not the ingenious epigrams you might see in other cities around the world, more like abstract signatures that look a bit like battle crests. The apartment has plaster walls, and the neighbors’ moans of pleasure or confrontations are, more than merely audible, shameless or intrusive. I hear, before knocking on his door, the movements of a tired body. My father has aged: he is no longer the man whose solidity was visible in the strength of his back, in the determined and sure expression in his Bedouin eyes. In his youth he was a boxer; I never learned to raise my fists, and as soon as I had enough words to invent my own philosophy, I considered him barbarous and atavistic for wanting me to assume poses seen on a Greek amphora. But I never told him that; I’d never had the courage to confront him in ways that obliged me to hold his gaze. When he opens the door, I think he doesn’t look like he’s been drinking, and the fear that his behavior will shock Viviane, or make her regret even more having come with me, disappears. My father is wearing a brown corduroy overcoat with patches on the elbows and twill cotton trousers of a vague gray. “Les enfants,” he greets us. But he does not invite us in.
“I feel like going out,” he says. “There’s a café here on the corner as bad as any other.”
We go back down the stairs, following him. He’s losing his hair: a sparse patch is visible among the gray curls on his head. I point it out to Viviane; she nods and smiles a little. From the other side of a wall we hear the voice of a man saying something in a language I didn’t understand.
“Fucking gypsies,” says my father. “When will they get used to talking like normal people. Did you walk here?”
He doesn’t look at us when he asks this question, and I don’t immediately realize he means us.
“No, we took the metro, monsieur,” Viviane says.
“Lazybones,” says my father. “How can you go down into that filthy tube on a day like this?”
The owner of the Café de la République, I discover, knows my father as well as a lifelong friend. He himself opens the door for us, and the four of us walk to a corner table wedged between the slot machine and the Formica counter, at the back. The coppery mirrors reflect a stained image back at us. It’s obvious this is my father’s table: whenever he arrived somewhere for the first time, he worried about where to sit, saying that customers who waiters identify with their own tables get better service, get to make calls—the telephone is an old-school model that still accepts coins—and can use the washroom even if they haven’t ordered anything. Only once we’re sitting down does my father ask me what’s on my neck.
“Nothing, a little swelling,” I tell him. “I’m on antibiotics, it’ll be fine.”
He doesn’t ask anything more. His curiosity has been satisfied.
It’s been so long since I last saw him that I’ve almost lost the habit of feeling intimidated: experiencing that sensation again might have annoyed me, but today timidity is far away, separated from me like a frog pinned out, ready for dissection. My father begins by ordering three glasses of cider—he doesn’t consult us, doesn’t ask what we want—and the serious stuff soon begins. A bottle of Four Roses appears on the glass table, among viscous circles and cigarette ash.
Viviane, aware that her role consists of filling with dialogue the silences that have always flowed between my father and me, begins to talk. Her talent for choosing phrases, for showing interest in other people’s concerns without appearing contrived or fake, for expressing sharp opinions on matters totally alien to her, has never ceased to surprise me. She tells my father he should go back to journalism, asks him if he doesn’t miss contact with reality.
“The problem is that reality’s a penniless whore,” he says. “People complain because the papers manipulate information and all that, but the truth is that reality couldn’t care less, as long as it gets well paid for being written about.”
He lifts his glass of whiskey to his lips, and the slot machine lights blink in the liquid and turn it into a urine sample for medical tests.
“That’s why it’s better to devote yourself to fiction, like this one.”
I haven’t devoted myself to fiction. I’ve published one travel book, after a short journey around Tibet, and the royalties have allowed me to pay the rent punctually and go to the cinema occasionally, and I get by, in the meantime, thanks to the contract I’ve signed for two more books. My father is a man who always wanted to write, and didn’t manage it. He worked as a journalist, first conducting conventional interviews for Libération and then, before my mother’s departure, writing more personal crónicas (literary chronicles, they used to be called) with the devotion of someone who’s just discovered his destiny. He must have read cheap translations of Tom Wolfe books dozens of times, and ended up writing two or three pieces his colleagues respected. Then, one Saturday as we were coming back from the racetrack, my father began to speed up a couple of blocks from home. I don’t know how he guessed, or if some specific fact allowed him to link a chain of coincidences ending with the incredible deduction that, over the course of that morning, my mother had left. But when we got to our building, he had only to greet the concierge to imagine what the mailbox would have confirmed. He didn’t even bother to open her parting letter. He already knew what it said, he told me later: it was the same as his last arguments with my mother.
He stopped working for several months. He ran out of money; the pressure of his obligations weighed heavily on him. Then something resembling a resurrection occurred, because he returned to the Observateur with a magnificent story on the most notorious fraud in the history of French sport. A popular singer, known to gamble, was implicated, as was a former functionary of de Gaulle’s government. I don’t remember how much he got paid for that article, but it was an excessive sum; offers began to arrive from all over, and I remember finding envelopes from Esquire and Harper’s in the mailbox. One day, his editor came to see him at home. I opened the door. A man in jeans, a silk shirt, and a jacket with patches on the elbows came in and said hello to my father. “Letters have arrived at the magazine,” he said. “I need to verify the facts in your text or we’re going to get sued.”
“I don’t understand,” said my father. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t look at me like that, man, I’m not questioning anything. Pierre hasn’t been able to verify your facts or find the informants you quote.”
“But I did. I found them and I talked to them. I thought you were on my side.”
“In the article you mention a hotel. You interviewed your main source there, the guy from the Olympic Committee, or whatever it was. Anyway, the one who knew all about the fraud.”
“Yes. That one.”
“Which hotel was it?” said the editor. “I need you to take me there. I need someone, a waiter, a bellboy, anyone, to recognize you.”
“It was the Ibis. The Ibis at the airport.”
“That’s what we thought. From the noises you describe in the text. But we called, and they have no record of a guest by the name of your source, and nobody remembers seeing anyone interviewed in the lobby.”
“All right, all right. It wasn’t in that hotel.”
“In the article you say it was.”
“That was to protect him. You saw the information the guy g
ave me. I wasn’t going to publish his address. Merde.”
“Don’t get upset. Just give me his phone number.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Tell me where he lives.”
“I don’t know,” said my father. “It was a while ago, I don’t keep files on the people I interview.”
The editor lowered his voice, as if what he was about to say was disgraceful to him, more than to my father.
“That piece is pure bullshit, and you know it. I’ll see you tomorrow at the office.”
They did not see each other at the office, because my father sent a resignation letter so he wouldn’t have to wait to be asked. By then, he had started drinking; the incident did nothing but confirm his reputation. A little while later, when I told him I was looking for student accommodation in Nanterre, he said: “I thought so. The rats are always the first to abandon a sinking ship.” I made excuses: it was true in part that I was sick of the daily trip from Paris to the university—the desolate cars of the RER, the crowds of sad men and women coughing over the previous day’s newspapers—but he was determined to believe that I despised his failure and was leaving him to sink alone. He never said so, of course. I had to interpret, to deduce it, as usual, from various comments here and there.
“So, how’s the fiction going, then?” asks my father.
I know he’s not expecting an answer. I think of saying I’m not the one who writes made-up things, Papa. But I don’t.
“Fine,” I say at half volume. “It’s going.”
My father stands up and we watch him walk toward the washroom. He leans on the backs of chairs, on the shoulder of a shaven-headed teenager who’s playing pinball, and on the doorknob, which is meant to look like an uncut diamond, a plastic prism so opaque that light does not reflect off it.
Lovers on All Saints' Day Page 10
